RC Site Sections

Site structure

Over the years Romantic Circles has grown into a fairly sprawling enterprise, which is both an asset and a liability. From its inception, the site has been an ambitious space of collaboration, academic experimentation, and niche DH projects. However, the amount and diversity of content on the site proves increasingly challenging for a small part-time staff to manage and maintain. The site structure is currently under examination, and it’s possible that RC might consolidate/archive a couple of these sections or their content in the coming years.

Currently, RC has nine main sections, all of which can be seen on site main navigation bar:

• Electronic Editions is an archive of Romantic-era texts curated and edited by esteemed scholars of Romanticism. Editions are labors of original archival work and scholarship uniquely suited to an online environment, and generally are available nowhere else. They are, as a general rule, the most complex, technically demanding, and extensive publications on the RC site. As an example of the potential of RC Editions as a DH project, see any of the six parts of The Collected Letters of Robert Southey on the site.
• The Praxis Series is a collection of peer-reviewed, edited volumes of literary criticism. You can think of each Praxis volume as a hybrid between a special edition of a literary journal and an edited collection of scholarly essays. RC Praxis has an ISSN, recognizing it as an online “continuing resource.”
• RC Pedagogies offers resources for teachers of Romantic studies at the secondary and collegiate level. The section’s main publication is the “Pedagogies Commons,” a peer-reviewed journal devoted to teaching Romanticism. RC Pedagogies also collects online syllabi for courses in Romanticism, hosts occasional “Pedagogies Hangouts” video chats about teaching Romanticism, and conducts an annual Pedagogy Contest co-sponsored by NASSR (North American Society for the Study of Romanticism).
• RC Unbound, conceived as “a sheaf of fugitive posts on urgent issues and events,” is a new RC publication as of 2020 that aims to respond to current events with clarity, approachability, and timeliness, and without citations. Unbound is published quarterly, and each issue consists of 3-4 short essays on a theme.
• RC Gallery is a collection of Romantic-era images and an investigation of romantic visualities. Each gallery exhibit is a series of curated images with extensive metadata and commentary. As of this writing, RC Galleries is in the midst of a redesign.
• Scholarly Resources collects research tools and scholarship-adjacent materials, including bibliographies, indexes and concordances, chronologies, engagement with adaptations and afterlives of Romantic-era texts, and other miscellaneous resources.
• Reviews and Receptions publishes short reviews of contemporary scholarship and monographs in the field of Romanticism, a compendium of pop culture’s engagement with Romanticism, and curated booklists on current topics in the field. Reviews and Receptions also hosts live Book Chats, featuring videos of scholars conversing on various topics, debates, and developments in the field.
• RC Audio hosts a collection of audio files including interviews, readings, and lectures. This section also includes Poets on Poets, which contains recordings of practicing poets from around the world reading a Romantic-period poem.
• “About RC” contains a brief history and description of the site, the current advisory board, an archive listing and linking to discontinued RC sections and initiatives, an index of contributors, submission and permissions info, staff info, and contact information.

RC Editions, Praxis, and Pedagogies Commons volumes are peer reviewed. The peer review process is managed by the section editors and, depending on the section and material, involves external review by 1–3 scholars in the relevant field (often RC board members). Materials for RC Unbound and Reviews are solicited by the General Editors or section editors and undergo review (often involving substantive editing) by those editors.

All published textual materials in RC Editions, Praxis, Pedagogies Commons, and Galleries are encoded to preserve metadata and formatting using TEI (XML) or JSON, then transformed to HTML for publication on the site. See below for more information about and instructions for encoding textual materials. RC Unbound, Reviews, Scholarly Resources, and Audio pages are generally prepared and presented as simple HTML.

As of this writing, the most active sections of the site are Praxis, Pedagogies, Unbound, Editions, and Reviews, all of which publish at least once a year.